Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented Monday from the court’s refusal to consider a case involving race and law enforcement.

The court’s senior GOP appointees wanted their colleagues to review the petition brought by the federal government, which raised questions about the relevance of race in analyzing whether Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures are violated.

It takes four justices to grant review. The denial appeared on the court’s order list, in which the justices announce the latest action in pending appeals. As usual, the court did not explain why it denied review.

The government’s petition came in the case of Donte Carter. He was charged with gun and theft offenses in Washington, D.C., and he moved to suppress the stolen firearm that law enforcement recovered from him after an officer asked him to hike his pants. He argued that he was technically “seized” under the Fourth Amendment at that point and that the officer lacked reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

The trial court denied his motion to suppress, but the appeals court reversed. The appeals court considered what it called “the coercive nature of the officers’ conduct and factoring in the elevated effect that this would have had on an objective and reasonable Black man in Mr. Carter’s shoes.” From that premise, the appeals concluded that Carter was seized under the Fourth Amendment when the officer asked him to raise his pants.

Dissenting from the Supreme Court’s denial of the government’s petition to review the appeals court’s ruling, Alito said the lawfulness of the appeals court’s inquiry “is an important question.” Joined by Thomas, he wondered: If officers “will need to quickly assess a person’s race, and if officers and courts must craft special rules for black persons, what about dark-skinned Latinos, other Latinos, and members of other minority groups?”

Alito noted that the court has said the Constitution is “color-blind,” and he said it’s “dangerous to allow an individual to be treated differently based on statistics, studies, or expert testimony that purports to show that members of the racial or ethnic group to which he belongs are more likely to act in a certain way than are members of other groups.”

While conceding that the appeals court’s test may have legitimate justifications, Alito said the matter warranted high court review.

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